Update list of EBSAs

[wardappeltans]

we are lacking EBSAs, such as those from the Baltic. https://www.cbd.int/ebsa/

[skybristol]

Well, ugh! The EBSA information from CBD is kind of annoying in that it looks like they are operating a pretty well "closed" system, at least in terms of software interactions. We can get to nicely structured pages like this, but there is no embedded metadata in the page for access through structured data mechanisms (schema.org alignment, microdata, JSON-LD, etc.). I also can't find an actual API of any kind behind the CBD data portal, meaning I can't write code against that system to keep other systems up to date. The off thing is that the file references for things like the geospatial boundaries of the EBSAs list "api" in the path, so perhaps there is a hidden API that they just aren't advertising and I can't find mention of online.

Am I missing something?

For some other cases like this, I've started working with Wikidata as a global, third party mechanism for leveraging, establishing as needed, linked open data that does have all of those missing pieces. Here's some work that I'm doing currently on the same kind of thing for the various levels of North American terrestrial ecosystem classification from the US EPA. For actual commits into Wikidata, I've forked and am working with the Wikidataintegrator package put out by some interesting folks at Scripps who built it for doing work in Wikidata with genomics-related data. I'm working through the process of getting a bot account authorized and identifier properties approved to fully establish the hierarchical ecoregion classification system for these records, which are not dissimilar to the EBSAs from a data standpoint.

Establishing the EBSA concept in Wikidata (with potential ties to at least an information piece in Wikipedia) would provide a useful rallying point for related linked data that won't necessarily be in the purview of or interesting to the CBD. We could incorporate the links to geojson files for each EBSA at the very least, giving us a programmable route to slurp and build out the spatial information for OBIS.

[bart-v]

After a bit of reverse engineering, you can easily do this: https://chm.cbd.int/database?schema_s=marineEbsa Produces a API call like this: https://api.cbd.int/api/v2013/index/select?&q=NOT+version_s:*+AND+realm_ss:chm+AND+schema_s:*++AND+(schema_s:marineEbsa)&rows=1000&start=0&wt=json

And one of the enties is "shapeUrl_ss": [ "https://chm.cbd.int/api/v2013/documents/3FEABE05-5E9C-966C-25DB-EEF8375F920D/attachments/NWIO_21_EBSA.geojson" ],